Is engineering management bullshit?

> I would posit a guess that most, if not all, engineers on HN have had to live through at least one terrible manager that has soured/tainted the position.

FWIW, all my engineering managers have been great.

> Oh please, there's a reason why those comments exist - because more terrible managers exist than those "good ones"

I guess that's just your experience? Just because you've had a few bad apples doesn't mean all engineering managers are terrible.

> present an aura of superiority

Sounds like you're just projecting your experience onto other folks.

Really the only two dimensions that matter for development as a function are time to market at a sufficient quality, and resources needed to maintain the codebase at sufficient quality once delivered. Any metrics about individual devs needs to support one of those two group goals.

The fewest lines of codes is an ok metric in that it often means more maintainable. But it can mean less maintainable if it's too cute. It's a leading indicator, but you can just directly measure bug volume and time to resolve issues.

Faster code is an irrelevant distraction 90% of the time.

Sister comment mentioned DORA metrics, which I wasn't familiar with and look exactly right:

* Deployment Frequency: Refers to the frequency of successful software releases to production.

* Lead Time for Changes: Captures the time between a code change commit and its deployable state.

* Mean Time to Recovery: Measures the time between an interruption due to deployment or system failure and full recovery.

* Change Failure Rate: Indicates how often a team’s changes or hotfixes lead to failures after the code has been deployed.

When I was just starting out as an engineer, I was very interested in what management was doing. I went to every town-hall type meeting I could, every business planning meeting, every financial meeting. I really wanted to be steeped in it to understand the role.

Year after year after year I learned again and again that there's something truly toxic about middle-management and up. It's like the higher you go, the worse the air gets, and your brain starts to get clouded and fuzzy. Technical people stay in their roles for decades and get better and better over time; management plays musical chairs where they change roles every 2 or 3 years. The new role has almost nothing to do with their old role. If you saw a whole group of people randomly switch every couple years between being an Aerospace Engineer, then a Software Engineer, then an Environmental Engineer, then a Structural Engineer, you'd rightly go: wow, all these engineering jobs must be super easy! They just throw anybody into those roles. They don't take any time to learn, etc. etc. So why, when people randomly switch every couple years between product manager, director of operations, financial director, project manager, sales manager, director of internal innovation, director of digital growth, director of New-Techy-Buzzword -- why do you not conclude the same thing? All those jobs are stupid and worthless, clearly, because they come and go with the wind, and anyone in the mid-to-upper-management sphere can take on any of those roles. Clearly they require no training. Clearly they are not hard. Having an MBA degree does not qualify you to do all of those roles, unless those roles have absolutely nothing to them. Note that I intentionally excluded anything having to do with "legal" in there, because that's an actual job that takes an actual expert.

My long-winded point is that I did the exact opposite of what you claim. I used to believe that software engineering is a piece in the overall puzzle and that all these other functions are an important part. But I learned, time and time and time again, that the primary driving force in corporate America is the Principal Agent Problem and that all these roles are just titles to be shuffled around among those in the Business Caste for their own personal benefit. Entire companies are nothing more than pawns in the game these guys (and it is mostly men) are playing with each other, jockying for the most impressive-sounding titles, extracting as much money as they can from the public sector into their own pockets. If they're actually doing their job well, they're losing at the game. You have to switch jobs every couple years to keep up.

Oh my sweet summer children. Feels like the author has perhaps never worked on a complex, big product or with any capable engineering management.

The worst and biggest messes in software engineering that I've seen have been situations where there was not enough engineering management. And those situations were fixed by... introducing proper engineering (and product!) management.

That being said, it is perhaps possible to survive with less engineering management in a situation where everyone is behaving and performing at senior or above level. However, realistically, that is very rarely the case.

im saying things based on my experience, but if yours is different and you see high quality and effective managers being created from engineers thats cool. can i send a resume over?

> managers are selected for their potential and receive lots of support

This support im questioning. Its all on the job training. I went to business school, i actually have a business degree. I didn't leave that school feeling like i should manage or lead. The "training" is on the job, the people who teach are your small peer of manager peers and maybe some corporate style training. Corporate training has never been effective from what I have seen.